3. team dream
When I went to Oxford, I already knew someone who lived in the town, an eccentric redhead I'd been to that boarding school with. Apart from anything else, he was the only asthmatic I'd ever met (I didn't know I'd had it as an infant).
The redhead owned a vintage car, or maybe a modern copy of one, with no roof or windscreen wipers and a passenger door you had to hold shut when the bit of string perished. On a trip to an old boys' reunion one rainy night, there's five of us getting drenched while I'm leaning forward to wipe the windscreen with the palm of my hand when Redhead shouts instructions.
A memorable night, followed by an interesting start to the next day. We stayed in one of the dormitories where we'd slept as kids, but when we woke up we found the redhead had had an asthma attack in the night and gone back to Oxford to fetch his inhaler. This left us without any transport, so we set off to walk to the nearest village - whereupon he appeared honking his horn like a knight of the road.
We weren't friends, but he was a personality and we met up a few times. One evening, I found someone else in the back seat of that car, a short solid guy in a woolly hat. No hat for me; hair down past my shoulders. Driving through Oxford city centre in that open-top car, long locks in the wind, Suffragette City blasting out: unforgettable.
The one in the hat was Bernard Stephen Cook, a computer whizzkid at a time when most people didn't know computers were in use. He'd moved south from Mexborough at sixteen and worked for Blackwell's, the big publishing company on the way to Oxford railway station. Their shop on Broad Street still has the biggest room in any bookshop in the world.
When he first arrived in Oxford, he was an electronics technician in a lab, which sent him to technical college so many hours a week. A lot of the others on day release came from the giant car manufacturing works at Cowley.
Standing out from these guys at the tech was someone Bernie described as 'a very odd bloke in a red tweedy jacket smoking a cigarette like a man who has never smoked or even seen a cigarette smoked.' The redhead himself, of shit boarding school and aristocratic family. Bernie Cook was drawn to him because he was 'the only student in the class other than me that didn't work at Cowley Works and open doors with his head'! In their year there, Bernie came top, Redhead second ('and he copied mine!').
The red introduced him to a couple of other old boys from that school. The three of them took a shine to Bernie and invited him to their family homes (palatial, he calls them) - though he always had the impression they regarded him as a curiosity, this lad from Up Norf. He didn't get the same sense from me. I had the same accent as them but my background was working-class, unlike theirs - or his.
Bernie brought two of them up to my room across the road from college - on the very night I was about to become better acquainted with the golden girl from the italian class! Talk about timing, but a pleasure deferred.
Instead of sending them home with some well-chosen words, I got in their car, and we drove to the school at midnight. The two guys hated the place too, and she came along for the ride. We pulled down the cricket nets and left them in a ha-ha, rutted the cricket pitch with the wheels, and broke the school sign, which I took home and eventually burned. Childish and spiteful? Well I was nineteen, it was a unique night out, and the two cricket masters deserved it. But driving over the cricket pitch was silly. I'd rather have driven over the pair of sadists. To seal a great occasion, I had my first kiss with the princess on the ride back.
You could say all three of those former classmates were characters, but I found them self-consciously idiosyncratic. And Bernie quickly realised what I knew: they weren't especially bright. All they really had was the posh chat. Remind you of a recent PM?
So Bernie took to hanging out with me and the Two Steves, because college boys like us could keep our ends up in a conversation - and provide an audience for his one-liners.
He had one for every occasion. Some twat vrumming his engine as he drove past: 'What else did you get for christmas?' I asked him if they did joke lessons in Yorkshire schools. Aye, he said. Half an hour on friday afternoon, ready for the weekend.
That's different from the intellectual rigour you need as a student, but we had to think on our feet around him. One day the four of us convened for a snack which led to The Greatest Fart Of All Time. Not strictly pertinent to the annals of a rock band, and more information than you necessarily need. But too late I've written it.
*
The Covered Market is one of Oxford's features, more important than any college. It was built in the 1770s to keep pedlars off the streets. There's a caff in there called Brown's - far as I know, nothing to do with our favourite restaurant on St Giles.
Brown's Café in the market has been around since 1920 (their sign outside says 1924 but it's wrong!). We went there a number of times as students and I've been back with girlfriends over the years.
It's been on screen. An episode of Inspector Morse and the prequel Endeavour. I remember the interior being brown (by name, by colour) and something pale, with formica tables. The cakes were good, the breakfasts too.
Back in 1973-74, my first year at college, we've taken over a table for four. I can picture it clearly. Bernie to my left, the Two Steves facing us. The coffee meets New Excelsior standards, the doughnuts are plump and jammy, conversation flows. Life is good.
But we're there a while, and at one point I feel a wind coming on. It can't be contained or suppressed, and there's no time to take it outside. So I do my best. I believe if I can edge my rear end to beyond the back of the chair, I can send the gust into the ether without a sound -
Except I'm not quick enough. The air explodes onto the seat of the wooden chair, which acts like a sounding board, a snare drum. It actually rattles! The Fart From The End Of The World resonates through the café and doubtless other parts of the market. As the Steves grin while they wince, Bernie puts his face in his hands. Quick as a flash, I turn to him.
Bernard!
He whips his fingers away and looks around the room with a hunted expression.
What the - ? It wasn't me!
But the damage is done. The Steves are shaking their heads and I'm all innocence. I was a student at Oxford University for three years. That was my smartest moment.
Oh, and the Grand Guff was as discreet as anything by Le Pétomane. There was no smell. You needed to know that.
*
So Bernie Cook became my best friend outside college, and we saw a lot of each other till 1990, when he moved back to Yorkshire with his wife and little daughter. After that, we lost touch for thirty years (I thought that was my fault, but it was his, the prat) before I made a pilgrimage up there during the coronavirus.
As he went up in the computing world, he shared a house in Howard Street, in the centre of Oxford, then bought a marvellous cottage on the edge of town, an old bakery. But when I first knew him, he had a room in a place off Walton Street, the other end from Worcester College. He lived next door to his future wife, though he never met her at the time.
His room had a bed, a wardrobe, a sloping sink, and the poster of a clown
Decades later, Bernie swears I squirted washing-up liquid on that poster. It was above the sink, he says. Well, maybe I was doing his dishes. Very kind of me. But if I squirted the clown out of vandalistic mischief, at least it was a bit rock 'n roll. A long way short of smashing up hotel suites on tour, but a start.
The only other things in the room were an amp, a speaker the size of a sideboard - and a bass guitar.
Aha...
The bass was a Hohner solid, as it that meant anything to me. I sat and listened to him play it a couple of times. Because of the amp or the speaker, or the size of the room, it rattled and blew deep bubbles of sound. The farting bass, he dubbed it. Perfect for what I had in mind.
So now we had a proper bit of kit to go with my mouth harp. I didn't care what instruments we were going to play (it wasn't meant to be a normal band), but I thought a guitarist might be useful, and a keyboard player because there was a piano in the college music room. I happened to know one of each, and they were close at hand.
*
My first ever tutorial at Oxford was with Harry Hatfield. We were in the same french set in the same college. A good looking guy, fresh faced and deadpan. The posh end of middle class and a dark horse with the ladies.
Can't remember how I found out he could play piano. Maybe I heard him one day, though I can't think where. Anyway, I thought I'd give him a go.
When I asked him about music, it was the first time we'd talked outside a language class.
Harry. You play piano, don't you?
Yes.
You're a serious musician, I suppose?
Yup.
Ooh-er. When you hear that, you don't go on to mention a rock band that's deliberately dreadful and doesn't exist. Turns out he was joking. As I say: deadpan. Took me a long time to ask him again.
*
The guitarist didn't turn up till the second year.
Pat Slade was younger than us. I always thought he knew Harry as kids, but I've just found out they met at Oxford. They went rowing together and played music.
When I got married, in 2007, the whole thing was held at Dulwich College. With what I feel about boys' public schools, this was an ironic choice to say the fucking least - but all the facilities were on site and it was a great day.
In the big dining room, they've got huge tall wooden plaques on the walls, with lists of head boys and pupils who made it to Oxbridge. I'm standing near Pat and Harry when one of them goes 'That's my father on the wall.' The other one looks and says 'There's mine too.' First time they realised both their dads had been to school there. Patrick's was in the air force, Harry's in the navy and a well-known astronomer. His lasting legacies are a map of the moon and an unexploded bomb in Genoa Cathedral, which he hit by mistake during the war!
In Britain, the summer of 1976 was notoriously hot. But the summer term of the year before was almost as fierce. I walked across the college grounds one evening, and the grass was turning brown. I had a girl on my arm, a real prize in a single-sex collegiate system, let me tell you. You had to look outside the university a lot.
My date that day was Angie Digby. I met her at a disco in another college, asked her to dance to a band called Good For Your Ears. She worked as a waitress in the Nosebag, an upstairs tea room on St Michael's that didn't shut down till 2022. Lot of right-on veggie food and good homemade cakes, a special place.
Angie was slim, with short tight blond curls, like a sexier version of Petula Clark. We were good together for a short time before she drifted away (I gave off unhealthy vibes that year), and I just found out she got married in Oxford a few years later.
On the way to my room, we pass a group of students sitting on the grass. A couple of them are playing acoustic guitars. One of these is Pat Slade, a distinctive figure with his russet afro in a white headband.
Now, I've always maintained a healthy attitude towards men playing guitars at gatherings. I'm John Belushi in Animal House. When he comes down the stairs and sees someone impressing two adoring girls with his guitar, he picks it up and smashes it to bits against a wall. The cinema I was in, all the men clapped and cheered.
But any guitarist was worth a look at the time. And Pat being a friend of Harry's, I had the finished line-up in my head.
Two singers who couldn't sing, including one who couldn't play mouth organ.
A bass player who'd never been in a band.
A guitarist I'd never talked to.
And a pianist who was too serious for this kind of thing.
A dream team, you'll agree.
But I had to postpone putting it together. Year Three I'd be abroad, as part of the university course. Italian rock music will always be crap, they haven't a fucking clue. But Rome here I come.